Seventy-Fifth Internet Marketing Podcast September 10th 2010. First page of Show Notes

The Effect of Google Instant on PPC

Chris:Hi and welcome to the Internet Marketing Unknown Secrets of SEO, we do websites, podcast!

Paul:That’s what’s up everybody. Welcome back, Friday morning 9:15ish we had another fun-filled edition. Got that surprise that we talked to you guys about, it’s going to be awesome.

Chris:Yeah. We got some great announcements. Man, some really big stuff has been going on. You are listening to podcast #75. This is the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. Thank you guys so much for listening and submitting reviews. Actually, somebody hasn’t submitted a review in awhile so…

Pau:Boo-hoo-hoo.

Chris:— somebody needs to submit a review ASAP. All you need to do is just go to iTunes, create a simple account, submit a review, hit us back so we know how to give some link love to, and, you know, show your appreciation. If you get any valuable information out of this, we don’t know how that’s happening. We’re sorry. We’re trying to fix it.

Paul:[Laughs] Yes. And, you know, we’ve got a great one. Actually, I need to get AJ — I need to [0:01:00] [Indiscernible] you about something. AJ needs a — he said something really cool about us. In that email he at the very bottom line, he says I’m doing — I’ll have to print it out.

Chris:Was that by Sotheby Southwest in —

Paul:No. That was Dean. But he’s — I’ll print it out. But he was like — basically he has gotten value out of what we have done. So that’s what’s up.

Chris:Oh, that’s Hawaii, right? Yeah.

Paul:ComputercornerHawaii.net or .com, I think. I don’t know. I think I’m going to print it.

Chris:I think they’re on the first page for like virus Hawaii or something, already?

Paul:That’s what it was. I’ll print it out so we can —

Chris:Oh, did I just —

Paul:–I’ll read it.

Chris:[Laughs].

Paul:It’s all I had this podcast.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:That was it. That was the nugget that I was savoring.

Chris:[Laughs] … just close it down. [Laughs] All right. We like to talk a little bit about what we mentioned in the last podcast. We were talking about pay-per-click. We’re going to continue that a little bit today ‘cause there’s so much information to talk about — who knows what we’re going to get to. As we try and have a tip every time, I just have got to mention the tip from podcast 72 which was, you know, become a rapper — actually from 73, become a rapper, it is cool.

Paul:There you go.

Chris:So that’s the tip. The tip from podcast 74 is hire an expert, which, you know, goes right in line once you’ve started —

Paul:Hire rapping experts.

Chris:That’ll be our tip for the day.

Paul:[Laughs]

Chris:Hire a rapping expert. Excellent. So, we also have news from today. You know, we got a little of buzz. Somebody sent us something about Google Instant. Are we going to talk about Google Instant? People are calling it a game changer. This is from Scott Bonner. Is it going to screw up pay-per-click — ‘cause that’s a great point. We thought of that immediately. You know, as you’re typing all the results are changing, do those count as impressions? And frankly —

Paul:‘Cause yesterday — all right so, I’m typing — I’m on Google and I’m starting to type in the search bar. And then–

Chris:I thought you were supposed to be working? What are you doing on Google?

Paul:What?

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:What? What is that? Disgust.

Chris:[Laughs]

Pau:So I’m typing in the search bar and I got a call from a guy in Larado. What’s up Castaneda Bail Bonds in Larado Texas. So I’m typing in L-A and before I hit the R — it’s L-A-R-E-D-O, Lady Gaga pops up and I’m like, “whoa, I didn’t search for that.” And then I hit R-E-D-O and then a map of Laredo, Texas pops up. And I’m like, what the hell is going on here?

Google has this new product called Instant search where it recognizes the letters that you’re typing in and figures, oh he’s probably looking for Lady Gaga ‘cause he typed in LA and she is very popular L-A-D-Y. So Google, it instantly recognizes what you’re searching for and will display search results depending on what you’re typing in. And it will change the search results with each letter that you actually type in to the search box. Kind of like Google search suggestions before how when you would type something in the search box, there would be a little dropdown that would pop up and it would give you suggestions as to what you’re looking for. Kind of like that same concept, they just took it to the next level and are instantly showing you search results.

Chris:Actually displaying the search results as you’re typing —

Paul:Yes.

Chris:— which is pretty phenomenal. I was looking this morning on some of the videos that Google has about the technology — technological challenges that they had, you know, jumping into this particular thing. You know, they’re right now they’re serving billions of search results a day and now, you know, he types LA, that’s a search result. And then probably when he got to R something else came up. So it may have been eight different searches by the time he got to the one that he was looking at. So, all these searches are kind of flashing. It’s incredibly well done ‘cause, you know, one of the points that they made right away was it’s not that you want to do partial searches. When Paul typed LA he didn’t want to search for Los Angeles.

Paul:Uh-hum.

[0:05:00]

Chris:That may not be a good example. But like news and I’ve got an example of what I was typing this morning, tech news. So type in T-E-C-H by the time I’m at T-E-C, I don’t want to search for the letters T-E-C, you know? And Google is smart enough to know that, it says, okay what’s the most relevant that starts with T-E-C. It’s kind of like everyone – we’re all used to the phone and whatever, the T9 auto fill…

Paul:Yeah. ‘Cause I text no T9 suggested spelling or whatever.

Chris:And so that’s what they’re doing. They’re using kind of suggested spelling/search. Well it’s suggested search.

Chris:And, you know, a lot of people are calling it a game changer. I think it depends on your perspective. You know, is it a game changer for SEO? I don’t think so. And then Scott Bonner made the point all these — is Google going to count these pay-per-click ads, are they going to count them as impressions.

And, you know, my first thought is obviously they shouldn’t count them as impressions. And in some real sense from the pay-per-click perspective, you know, it’s good to know your impressions and even if Google elevates them really what you’re monitoring when you’re looking at pay-per-click is the actual clicks. So, you know, from that perspective. Sometimes you’re interested in impressions because maybe you’re trying to do some branding you’re not actually interested in the clicks and obviously —

Paul:And it can also help with your click-through ratio ‘cause your click-through ratio is determined from your number of impressions. So people that really follow your click-through ratio, it could change. It could go down because if — if they count these search results as impressions, I got a set of search results for L, LA, LAR, LARE, so on and so forth. So by the time I had typed out Laredo, I had gotten probably what? L-A-R-E-D –I can count — six different search results. If they count those as impressions, which I hope they don’t, it will screw your —

Chris:Impressions count. It’ll just be elevated.

Paul:Yeah, which will screw your click-through ratio. And we use it —

Chris:Oh, that’s right ‘cause — cause —

Paul:And your click-through ratio is what we use to determine how effective is your PPC ad, how effective is the title and the —

Chris:Body of the —

Paul:— what is it, snippet?

Chris:Yeah.

Paul:What’s that thing called?

Chris:The body we’ll call it.

Paul:Whatever is in the — whatever is —

Chris:There’s probably some technical term that —

Paul:Yeah, I think it’s called a snippet or — and you know in the search results you get the title tag and you get a couple of sentences and then your URL.

Chris:Your link, yeah.

Paul:So that’s what — the click-through ratio is what we use to determine how effective is this, does it need to change, do we need to add something to it. So I hope that —

Chris:So basically you’re saying I was wrong?

Paul:Well, no I think — no I think it is good. ‘Cause I used to not until I went and really got into click-through ratios ‘cause I was like… When we started to really do internet marketing and PPC, I was like, “Okay, yeah, now I was going to…”

Chris:It makes sense, right? So, you’re right Scott. And yes, okay, so our impression count is in some sense does not matter, but Paul is exactly right. It matters incredibly when it comes to the body of the ad.

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:Is it going to an effective ad. So you can decide — you know, in a great way if we weren’t talking about Google Instant and you had, you know, a hundred million impressions, and you’ve got one click then you have some sort of idea that your ad is not very well laid out.

Paul:Exactly. I agree. I don’t look at impressions. I don’t care what the impressions are. I care what the click-through ratio is which is —

Chris:Which is impressions versus clicks.

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:And so yeah.

Paul:And then someone’s like, “I’ve got a billion impressions.” So?

Chris:Yup.

Paul:And —

Chris:Well, one thing that it could do though is eventually, you know, there may be okay free instant search and post instant search. And, you know, previously we were expecting a 3% click-through rate, now we expect 1% or you know —

Paul:Uh-hum.

Chris:It may just skew all the numbers and we just got to get used to the fact that there are more impressions. And the fact that even though there’s more impressions the ratio of a good ad versus a bad ad is still going to be relevant.

Paul:Yes.

Chris:And so we can have that.

Paul:You know, I’d like to think that Google is smart and this is — you know what, I can make this assumption. I was going to say, I’d like to think that Google is smart enough so that they would recognize the whole impression, click-through ratio issue and make adjustments for it. So maybe they’ll say — and someone sent this in the office yesterday. Maybe they will put a time limit on it. If you type in Laredo, and maybe they’ll say all right we’ll cut this off. After three seconds of him looking at it, we’re going to count that as an impression.

Chris:Right.

Paul:If he does not type anything else or hit search, we’re going to count that as an impression. I’d like to think they did something like that. However, I’d like to think they’d actually have somebody with some sense working at Google Places and they don’t so…

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:I mean I just have this bitter thing that gets —

Chris:I think we just —

Paul:— Google places right now.

Chris:I think we just put them on blast.

Paul:I really did, man.

Chris:‘Cause that was —

[0:10:00]

Paul:I really did.

Chris:Yeah. We’re struggling with some Google places.

Paul:Gosh, yes we are. And you know —

Chris:And there’s no like help or–

Paul:I know.

Chris:Like, oh that’s how it works.

Paul:Google’s like this…

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:It’s like that. And Scott Bonner, I wanted to say this. Here’s what he wrote, “I didn’t know if you guys were going to talk about Google Instant tomorrow, but here was what I thought about it.” No, we weren’t going to talk about it.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:But now that you put us on the spot —

Chris:Do you know how much research I had to do? Let me tell you ‘cause this is one thing I thought was pretty — did you have any…?

Paul:No.

Chris:Yeah.

Paul:No. We weren’t.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:But I guess we will now.

Chris:So I, you know, come in on Friday mornings and I like to get a little piece of news, and so I go to start typing tech news and I get tech – TECH space N and then nine comes up. And I’m like, “What is this?” It’s spelled N-9-N-E. And then I read the kind of first headline, it’s an RNB. So I asked the guys in the office do anybody who this is. So somehow apparently while I was asleep overnight RNB became more important and popular than tech news?

Paul:Yes. Well, I was thinking when you said, “Does anybody know Tech N9ne?” I was like, “Are you buying a gun?”

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:‘Cause there was a Tec-9 gun. I was like, “Whoa.”

Chris:We are in Houston.

[Crosstalk]

Yeah. That is the preeminent thought of most people here.

Paul:There are other ways to work out your issues.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:I can get you to a guy that could really help you where you ain’t going to kill nobody.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:But you know what? You know, that’s a good point. Here’s why I think that happened. When I typed — I was looking for Laredo. LA, I got Lady Gaga, people like I think that’s a test —

Chris:That’s what they search most. Yeah.

Paul:— niche to have music. Music is taking over the internet — digital music. Everybody’s Googling artists and looking for downloads and songs and streaming music so…

Chris:We just got some — I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the sales collateral from Mike that he sent.

Paul:I haven’t. Sorry Mike.

Chris:And one of them is the fact that for music — I don’t know. Was it like between three, ‘cause that’s when they can use the internet, and like 28 or 38 even the first place that they learn about music is actually on the web. It’s no longer the radio.

Paul:Okay. Oh, which — okay. Which we’ll about — bring up some news that I just thought about ‘cause we skipped the news. [Laughs]

Chris:Are you just making up things?

Paul:[Laughs]

Chris:We haven’t skipped the news like tech — Google Instant is like —

Paul:iTunes changed their logo. They’ve got a bunch of heat about it. I thought it was weird. I kind of liked it. You see this little blue thing now? Steve Jobs said a hilarious response. Some guy was like ripping it apart and you guys know this. Steve Jobs will sometimes answer customer service emails. He was like, “Why is this — why are you changing this? You’re ruining 10 years of branding” and blah, blah. “It sucks, we don’t like it.” And Steve Jobs’ response was, “We disagree.”

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:That was it. But —

Chris:Remember — you’ve got to remember, this is also the man that has in the past said, you are holding the phone wrong.

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:You’re holding your head wrong. You’re listening wrong.

Chris:[Laughs]

Paul:But what — to segue what you’re saying is how music — now people see music on the internet, the old iTunes logo had a CD behind it with the music notes. Now, it’s just the music notes which says that — and he was like music is no — the old is —

Chris:It’s not a CD anymore.

Paul:It’s not — yeah. Now its digital media.

Chris:What? Does that dude wish he went back to a record instead of the CD?

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:Like, oh you’re ruining our branding. You know, we used to be RCA had a record on it and —

Paul:Yeah. Now, it’s just like digital music. So what else is — now that I’m —

Chris:I was going to say so a guy who helped me build my house he has an iPhone and he put a post up and he goes, “My iPhone is amazing at does apps, at scheduling, at…” I mean he went on this litany thing. “The only thing it can’t do? It sucks as a phone.”

[Laughter]

Dropped calls all over the place so… I just wanted to comment. So as I’m typing tech nine and as you’re typing Laredo — you know this is pretty interesting ‘cause one of the coolest aspects of the internet is kind of the randomness, right?

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:You can get on there and you could start — oh let me click this. And, you know, you start doing a search on Laredo, the next thing you know you’re looking at Madonna ‘cause you did — you know, you went to Lady Gaga —

Paul:Yeah.

Chris:— that was whatever Christina Aguilera and then you were talking about Madonna — reading something about Madonna. Google Instant adds to that, right? So, I typed in tech nine and I now know there’s a group called Tech N9ne. Maybe I’ll check them out. I don’t know what’sthe recommendation of the office around here if I should, but you know —

Paul:It’s a —

Chris:That’s cool.

Paul:Like I don’t want to say a time waster, but like this is an easy way to get trapped on the internet. Right? So I type in LA, oh there’s Lady Gaga. Let me listen to this song very quick. Oh, wait —

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